Image vs data backup

I have three hard drives. The first drive is my system and boot drive. The second drive I use simply to store various files and documents that I don't want clogging up my system drive. The third drive I recently bought to hold backups of the first two drives. When I backup my system drive, I perform a partition image backup with ATI 11.

My question is this: when backing up that second storage drive, am I better off doing a partition image backup like I do with my system drive, or should I simply just do a data backup of all the files on that drive since it contains no system information? Note, I regularly change or modify the contents of the drive, and wish to do regular incremental backups of it as I change its contents. Which method is faster and more efficient? Which method yields a smaller file size for the TIB file? Or is the no difference at all?

Any advice, facts or opinions is appreciated.

 

For your data drive use a program like SecondCopy from http://www.centered.com/ then your data is not tied up in a propierty format like an image file, thus you can access the files quickly in Explorer when needed. SecondCopy gives you plenty of options for your back up job(s).

 

I agree with Aussie42 and SecondCopy is one of my favourite apps.

 

I agree with Aussie42, but if you want a compressed backkup to save space, you could do either an image or file backup of the drive.

An image will be faster, but a file backup will allow you to select which folders on the drive get backed up. I think incrementals work better with a file backup since the Windows file attributes can be used to determine which files have changed or are new.

 

For what it's worth, image backups of data disks are fast and efficient, but they are also pretty much all or nothing. In other words if the image becomes corrupt, you have probably lost the whole backup.

Image backups both provide compression and the ability to mount the image itself as an additional hard drive from which you can pick the individual files or folders you want, and copy them where you wish.

I use both, as your previous advisers do, but the folder based, uncompressed system is a synch program that maintains in the background and automatically copies of any folders that exactly match all changes in the original. I do it in too levels. Some backup every hour, and others every day. It provides two backup copies of each file. Disk space is cheap. The down side of this is that if I don't discover that a file is damaged within a day, I have only three copies of a damaged file. That's when the image, also made daily, and maintained for a week comes in. All pretty complicated, I suppose.

Have a good day.